I have the 8th Annual GREAT CANADIAN CABIN PARTY/3rd Annual Great Canadian Classic Golf Tournament tentatively scheduled for July 21-23, 2006. If you have any comments on the date, now's your chance - leave a comment.

The site has been up and down over the past couple of days due to some issues with my cablemodem that have hopefully now been resolved. Enjoy!

My father was honoured last Wednesday night with the Saskatchewan Centennial Medal:

(click for larger versions)

1LT John H. Avera (soon to be Captain John H. Avera) is back on American soil.

Hooah!!!

I recently had the opportunity to set up a piece of software called MoinMoin:

MoinMoin is an advanced, easy to use and extensible WikiEngine with a large community of users. Said in a few words, it is about collaboration on easily editable web pages. MoinMoin is Free Software licensed under the GNU GPL.

Here's some easy steps (with commands) to get it going on your Fedora Core 4 system. This guide is assuming you already have Apache running on your server and that you are only interested in hosting one Wiki site, because that's all I've used it for so far.

1. Install MoinMoin

   yum install moin
   

   You might need to install mod_python as well (since it runs on Python), so in that case your command might look like this:

   yum install moin mod_python
   

2. For the purposes of this installation, we're going to assume that you'd like your Wiki to live in the folder /var/www/moin/mywiki. MoinMoin works a little bit differently than other software. Rather than an explicit install directory, some configuration and other data are stored in the "install folder", while the software itself lives elsewhere. You are expected to copy these default folders to somewhere else and have your Wiki point to there.

   cp -R /usr/share/moin/data /var/www/moin/mywiki
   cp -R /usr/share/moin/underlay /var/www/moin/mywiki
   cp -R /usr/share/moin/config/wikiconfig.py /var/www/moin/mywiki
   

3. You need to set appropriate permissions to ensure that your web server (usually running using a user called apache) can read and write to the appropriate directories while stopping other users from getting access to it.

   chown -R apache:apache /var/www/moin   
   chmod -R ug+rwX /var/www/moin    
   chmod -R o-rwx /var/www/moin
   

4. You have to configure your web server to serve up your Wiki instance. It's easier to do this in a separate configuration file rather than editing the main httpd.conf file, so create a new one in your Apache configuration folder (i.e. /etc/httpd/conf.d/moin.conf) and open it in your favourite text editor. Now paste the following into the file (the Alias /wiki line is not a typo - MoinMoin needs to refer to that path to get it to work, it helps it run more than one Wiki but also restricts you from having just "wiki" as your folder name to the outside world):

   Alias /wiki/ "/usr/share/moin/htdocs/"
   <Location /mywiki>
       SetHandler python-program
       # Add the path of your wiki directory
       PythonPath "['/var/www/moin/mywiki'] + sys.path"
       PythonHandler MoinMoin.request::RequestModPy.run
       # Location value must match the Apache Location value!
       PythonOption Location /mywiki
   </Location>
   

5. Open the Moin configuration file you copied over earlier (wikiconfig.py) and edit it. You only have to modify it in a few places:

       # Site name, used by default for wiki name-logo [Unicode]
       sitename = u'The title of my new Wiki'
   
       # Where your mutable wiki pages are. You want to make regular
       # backups of this directory.
       data_dir = '/var/www/moin/mywiki/data/'
   
       # Where read-only system and help page are. You might want to share
       # this directory between several wikis. When you update MoinMoin,
       # you can safely replace the underlay directory with a new one. This
       # directory is part of MoinMoin distribution, you don't have to
       # backup it.
       data_underlay_dir = '/var/www/moin/mywiki/underlay/'
   

6. Everything should be set up for you now. Restart your web server and you'll be set!

   /sbin/service httpd restart
   

   This is a basic setup - if you'd like more or different functionality, read the docs and give it a go!

Comments and feedback are welcome!

I've been quiet for the last few weeks for no good reason other than I've been busy. Things I can't talk about (work) and things I can't talk about (not-work) have been taking up a lot of my time lately. I've also been getting back into the swing of things at the gym so my home life doesn't really start until 8pm or so each day which leaves little time for the finer things in life.

Last night I joined Brad and other friends and family at Brad's parents' new house for supper and it was a nice house and a great time. I had to leave early to go to hockey but it won't be the last time we have a fun night over there.

I think I've been to La Bodega at least once each of the past three weekends, which I can't complain about. The place is a block away from my house and for some reason I haven't taken the opportunity to hang out there since I moved here. I've got a lot of lost time to make up for ;)